{news} Voters Deserve To Hear From Al Candidatesl

[clifford thornton]

http://www.courant.com/features/lifestyle/hc-susan1029.artoct29,0,2026181column<http://www.courant.com/features/lifestyle/hc-susan1029.artoct29,0,2026181.column>

Voters Deserve To Hear From All Candidates
October 29, 2006 


If you want to understand what brings on voter apathy, a small meeting room just off the lobby at Central Connecticut State University's student center is a good place to start.

Clifford Thornton, Green Party candidate for governor, has come to talk to members of the Progressive Student Alliance, an organization whose members seek to expose students to new ways of looking at the issues. The alliance's president, Wes Strong, a sociology major from East Hampton, tried to attract all the candidates for an open forum, but to no avail. But Thornton is here after a long day spent traversing around the state.

As it turns out, Thorton was free, even though the second and last gubernatorial debate was going on.

Save for one notable exception, Connecticut's political debates have decidedly been for the two major parties - third-party candidates need not apply. Even though four gubernatorial candidates met the secretary of state's criteria for candidacy, only two were included in either of the televised debates. Say what you want about the democratic process, but it failed here. Only two candidates participated in what is arguably the largest (and most accessible) forum available for voters. Come Election Day, voters won't have the whole picture.

Neither will voters in the state's overheated senatorial race. There, only one of three debates included all five candidates. The others only included three candidates - yet strangely, one of those, Joseph Lieberman, is running as an independent whose presence in the debates has never been questioned. (The two mostly missing U.S. Senate candidates are Ralph A. Ferrucci of the Green Party and Timothy A. Knibbs of the Concerned Citizens Party.)

"But that's not fair," one student said at the CCSU meeting.

It's not fair. Nor is it democratic (or republican). And we should be ashamed of ourselves. We're proving to disaffected voters that democracy is restricted to big-ticket participants with deep pockets. And the people who broadcast the debates do so by borrowing the airwaves. Those airwaves belong -- so says the Federal Communications Commission - to the citizens. And the citizens deserve to see and hear everyone.

This argument sounds downright "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"-esque, doesn't it? But the fact is it's true.

Yet here, during the debate, Thornton is leaned back in a plastic chair, jacket open, ready to answer questions while he watches the television mounted on the wall overhead. He put 700 miles on the car in the last two days. Thornton is beat, and he said as much when he came into the room and set a Wild Oats paper bag of campaign paraphernalia on the table. When he asks Strong how many students to expect, he doesn't seem disappointed with the answer - anywhere from 15 to 25.

But compare that to the roughly 64,000 homes tuned in for the Oct. 18 gubernatorial debate, and you can see that the two major-party candidates got so much more exposure than Thornton, or Joseph A. Zdonczyk of Concerned Citizens, the other candidate for governor.

To a small but rapt audience, Thornton quickly lays out the Green Party platform: free college and enhanced mass transportation and a radically different drug policy. Overhead, his party's first-ever television commercial pops up (a protest to get Thornton into the debate), and the candidate shakes his head. The ad was filmed outside the first debate. He did not call for a protest at the second one.

"I would be naïve if I placed all this on race and class," Thornton said. "It's about ideas. My background is athletics. I played basketball and baseball. I don't go into anything without looking to win. But I have to be realistic. We are looking at building the Green Party."

He had asked one journalist involved in the debate to ask the Republican and Democratic candidates why all candidates weren't included. I bet him a dollar the journalist (a respected reporter) would.

But the reporter didn't. In the polished world of two-party politics, going off-script would have been entirely too much to ask. And here is where you lose so many would-be voters. If they think that the fix is in and the game is locked, why ever would they want to get involved? 



Susan Campbell is at scampbell at courant.com or 860-241-6454. 




Thornton for Governor
PO Box 1971
Manchester, CT 06045
votethornton at yahoogroups.com<mailto:votethornton at yahoogroups.com>
www.votethornton.com<http://www.votethornton.com/>
860 657 8438-H
860 268 1294-C
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Paid for by Thornton For Governor
Max H. Wentworth, Treasurer
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